In an extraordinary new book, Jerusalem: The Biography, Simon Sebag
Montefiore tells the 3,000-year-old story of the world’s holiest
city. In today’s first instalment: The creation of Jerusalem as the
Jewish capital.

Zion was said to be impregnable, and how David captured it is a
mystery. The Bible portrays the Jebusites lining the walls with the
blind and the lame, a warning to any attacker of what would befall
him. But the king somehow penetrated the city — through what the
Hebrew Bible calls a zinnor. This may be a water-tunnel, one of the
network now being excavated on the Ophel hill, or it may be the name
of some magical spell. Either way, “David took the stronghold of
Zion: the same is the city of David.”

This capture may just have been a palace coup. David did not
slaughter the Jebusites; instead he co-opted them into his
cosmopolitan court and army. He renamed Zion the City of David,
repaired the walls and summoned the Ark of the Covenant (recaptured
in battle) to Jerusalem. Its awesome sanctity killed one of those
moving it, so David placed it with a trusted Git until it was safe to
bear. “David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the
Lord with shouting and the sound of the trumpet.” Donning the
sacerdotal loincloth, “David danced before the Lord with all his
might.” In return, God promised David, “thine house and thy kingdom
shall be established forever.” After the centuries of struggle, David
was declaring that Yahweh had found a permanent home in a holy city.

Michal, Saul’s daughter, mocked her husband’s half-naked submission
to God as a display of vulgar vanity. While the earlier books of the
Bible are a mixture of ancient texts and backdated stories written
much later, the rounded, unheroic portrait of David, buried within
the second Book of Samuel and the first Book of Kings, reads so
vividly that it may have been based on the memoir of a courtier.

David chose this stronghold for his capital because it belonged
neither to the northern tribes nor to his own southern Judah. He
brought the golden shields of his conquered enemies to Jerusalem,
where he built himself a palace, importing cedarwood from his
Phoenician allies in Tyre. David is said to have conquered a kingdom
that stretched from Lebanon to the borders of Egypt, and eastwards
into today’s Jordan and Syria, even placing a garrison in Damascus.
Our only source for David is the Bible: Between 1200 and 850 bc, the
empires of Egypt and Iraq were in eclipse and left meagre royal
records, but they also left a power vacuum. David certainly existed:
An inscription found in 1993 at Tel Dan in northern Israel dating
from the ninth century BC shows that the kings of Judah were known as
the House of David, proving that David was the kingdom’s founder.

Yet David’s Jerusalem was tiny. At this time, the city of Babylon, in
today’s Iraq, covered 2,500 acres; even the nearby town of Hazor
covered 200. Jerusalem was probably no more than 15 acres, just
enough to house about 1,200 people around the citadel. But the recent
discoveries of fortifications above the Gihon Spring prove that
David’s Zion was much more substantial than previously thought, even
if it was very far from an imperial capital. David’s kingdom,
conquered with his Cretan, Philistine and Hittite mercenaries, is
plausible too, however exaggerated by the Bible, and was only a
tribal federation held together by his personality. The Maccabees
would, much later, show how dynamic warlords could quickly conquer a
Jewish empire during an imperial power vacuum.

One evening, David was relaxing on the roof of his palace: “He saw a
woman washing herself and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.
And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, Is this
not Bathsheba?” The woman was married to one of his non-Israelite
mercenary captains, Uriah the Hittite. David summoned her and “she
came in unto him and he lay with her,” making her pregnant. The king
ordered his commander Joab to send him her husband back from the wars
in present-day Jordan. When Uriah arrived, David ordered him to go
home to “wash thy feet” though he really intended that Uriah should
sleep with Bathsheba to cover up her pregnancy. But Uriah refused so
David ordered him to take this letter back to Joab: “Set ye Uriah in
the forefront of the hottest battle … that he may be smitten.” Uriah
was killed.

Bathsheba became David’s favourite wife, but the prophet Nathan told
the king the story of a rich man who had everything but still stole a
poor man’s only lamb. David was appalled by the injustice: “the man
that hath done this thing shall surely die!” “Thou art that man,”
replied Nathan. The king realized that he had committed a terrible
crime. He and Bathsheba lost their first child born of this sin — but
their second son, Solomon, survived.

Far from being some ideal court of a holy king, David presided over a
bearpit that rings true in its details. Like many an empire built
around one strongman, when he ailed, the cracks started to show: His
sons struggled for the succession. His eldest, Amnon, may have
expected to succeed David but the king’s favourite was Amnon’s half-
brother, the spoiled and ambitious Absalom, with his lustrous head of
hair and a physique without blemish: “In all Israel there was none to
be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty.”

After Amnon lured Absalom’s sister Tamar to his house and raped her,
Absalom had Amnon murdered outside Jerusalem. As David mourned,
Absalom ﬂed the capital and returned only after three years. The king
and his favourite were reconciled: Absalom bowed to the ground before
the throne and David kissed him. But Prince Absalom could not rein in
his ambition. He paraded through Jerusalem in his chariot and horses
with 50 men running before him. He undermined his father’s
government — “Absalom stole the heart of Israel” — and set up his own
rebel court at Hebron.

The people ﬂocked to the rising sun, Absalom. But now David regained
some of his old spirit: He seized the Ark of the Covenant, the emblem
of God’s favour, and then abandoned Jerusalem. While Absalom
established himself in Jerusalem, the old king rallied his
forces. “Deal gently for my sake with the young man,” David told his
general, Joab. When David’s forces massacred the rebels in the forest
of Ephraim, Absalom ﬂed on a mule. His gorgeous hair was his
undoing: “And the mule went under the thick boughs of a great oak,
and his head caught hold of the oak and he was taken up between the
heaven and the earth; and the mule that was under him went away.”
When the dangling Absalom was spotted, Joab killed him and buried the
body in a pit instead of beneath the pillar the rebel prince had
built for himself. “Is the young man Absalom safe?” the king asked
pathetically. When David heard that the prince was dead, he
lamented: “Oh my son, Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, would God I
had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

As famine and plague spread across the kingdom, David stood on Mount
Moriah and saw the angel of death threaten Jerusalem. He experienced
a theophany, a divine revelation, in which he was ordered to build an
altar there. There may already have been a shrine in Jerusalem whose
rulers are described as priest-kings. One of the original inhabitants
of the city, Araunah the Jebusite, owned land on Moriah which
suggests that the city had expanded from the Ophel onto the
neighbouring mountain. “So David bought the threshing ﬂoor and the
oxen for 50 shekels of silver. And David built there an altar unto
the Lord and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.” David
planned a temple there and ordered cedarwood from Abibaal, the
Phoenician King of Tyre. It was the crowning moment in his career,
the bringing together of God and his people, the union of Israel and
Judah, and the anointment of Jerusalem herself as the holy capital.
But it was not to be. God told David: “Thou shalt not build a house
for my name, because thou hast been a man of war and hast shed blood.”

Now that David was “old and stricken,” his courtiers and sons
intrigued for the succession. Another son Adonijah made a bid for the
throne, while a lissom virgin, Abishag, was brought in to distract
David. But the plotters underestimated Bathsheba.

Bathsheba claimed the throne for her son Solomon. David called in
Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, who escorted Solomon on the
king’s own mule down to the sacred Gihon Spring. There he was
anointed king. The trumpet was blown and the people celebrated.
Adonijah, hearing the celebrations, sought refuge in the sanctuary of
the altar, and Solomon guaranteed his life.

After an extraordinary career that united the Israelites and cast
Jerusalem as God’s city, David died, having ordered Solomon to build
the Temple on Mount Moriah. It was the authors of the Bible, writing
four centuries afterwards to instruct their own times, who made the
imperfect David into the essence of the sacred king. He was buried in
the City of David. His son was very different. Solomon would finish
that sacred mission — but he started his reign, in about 970 bc, with
a bloody settling of scores.